78 Answers

Honestly, it is best to leave this to professionals. Animal management is difficult, and there are often no easy answers.
Giving the cubs to another zoo seems easy, but I don’t know if their is a need for it. Often, zoos have plenty of lions.

What do I think? I think I don’t want anyone from the Copenhagen Zoo dog-sitting while I am out of town.

Seriously, they have the most bizarre way of handing zoo population. I understood culling the giraffe herd because of fears of inbreeding, but the lions they just fed the giraffe to? Why don’t they swap a lion instead of killing them?

@filmfann I tend to think of zoo’s as protecting and ensuring the survival of the animals themselves, as opposed to the entire species. I don’t believe lions or giraffe’s are endangered species after all, so I’m not sure what makes one pride better than another.

Marius being killed in a public venue, as a healthy animal, is very upsetting as well.

Apparently the new male lion wouldn’t have accepted the old lady lion and the cubs as his own, and if he tried to breed with her, she was past the age (seems odd since she has cubs but I’m not a professional.)

It just seems cruel. Why not let them go to a preserve or something instead of flat out killing them?

Zoo animals are only traded with zoo-s within an acknowledged network, but that means the gene pool gets smaller and smaller.

The animals are not sold, because the zoo loses control of the animal as soon as it has a new owner. That owner could sell them to circuses where the animal would be miserable until it died.

They cannot return the animals to the wild.

I think they zoos are concerned about the over all survival of the specie as well as the long-term health of their individual animals.

It’s a shame humans can’t be as good stewards of the food crops we grow. Instead the gene pool gets narrower and narrower and we’re modifying even that artificially. We’re reaching the point where a major new corn, wheat or soy blight could leave millions hungry, if not starved. To that end, there is a station (in Antarctica I believe) where they are trying to save ‘heritage’ seed of every known plant.

Animals do not have rights, because they do not possess the prerequisites which define rights.
Having said it animals, especially vertebrates, and most especially mammals, deserve a distinct level of respect and empathy. I I think the Danish zoo folks could have done better than they did.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”.

@ibstubro Watch the mutilation of the giraffe in public again and tell me a group of millionaires can’t figure out where to place the animals… It’s absurd to write this all off as, “if returned to the wild they will die.” There has to be another way.

Almost every critter on Earth is slaughtered for human consumption in some region, including dogs, horses and monkeys.

I suppose the Zoo erred by feeding the giraffe to the lions. I’m sure people would have paid good money to attend a same-as-domesticated black tie ‘Roasted Giraffe Banquet.” Or better yet, they could have sold a Giraffe Tag to the highest bidder on eBay, then had the banquet.

How does a zoo giraffe have more rights than a wild deer? Yet we allow thousands of deer to be ‘harvested’ every year because it strengthens the species.

@ibstubro You make a valid point, however, taking a captive animals life because they want a newer, younger specimen, or something to attract more zoo goers is not the same as harvesting the excess of a population.
Zoos that kill animals because they can’t place them elsewhere and simply want to ramp up their revenue with something new and different happens all the time and it is unethical to say the least.

For those proposing sanctuaries… would you be happy to pay for regular international giraffe transport (presumably with some kind of medical entourage) with your tax dollars? Because even if sanctuaries would be willing to take new animals from abroad, I’m guessing that would be very costly, and you must realize that it’s never going to be just one giraffe or just one lion. This would have to be a regular occurrence.

@rojo Exactly. Until humans learn to revere all life forms we are doomed and the attitude of ” they’re just animals, who the fuck cares” is part of the insanity and arrogance that propagates cruelty on all levels.

@Dutchess_III Well, that may be, but as I mentioned in another posting, to turn a blind eye on suffering makes one evil. I beleive all creatures have the “right” to be treated well and enjoy their lives, even if they end up on the table. Better to be a happy cow in a pasture and one day have a bullet out in your head, than to be a cow chest deep in cow shit in some horrible stockyard. Cruelty is a man made action too, in nature there is no cruelty, everything lives in accordance to what it is until they die of old age or are taken down by a predator.

Death and being preyed upon is not cruelty, living a horrible life of pain and fear at the hands of humans is.

There are insects that lays eggs within another animal’s body. When the eggs hatch they eat the host animal from the inside out. I imagine they’re in a lot of pain while they slowly die. Would you consider that cruel or simply nature?

Death, in an of itself, is not cruel. I’m sure they simply put the giraffe to sleep. However, I would have preferred they find a different way.

Simply nature, cruelty is not part of the natural life cycle of anything, it just is.
Competition for survival just is, and parasites are natural entities of population control.
Everything serves a purpose.

What is the definition of “cruelty” @Coloma? Some carnivores will start eating other animals, even babies, while they’re still alive. Thinking of the pain and fear that animal is experiencing seems pretty cruel to me!

I don’t think the prime function of a zoo is the same as a circus or an amusement park – they don’t share the same ‘entertainment is primary’ mentality.

To me modern zoos are about education and preserving a healthy gene pool of animals. All the people I’ve met that were affiliated with a zoo are primarily passionate about the animals. I’m sure that putting an animal down is never an easy decision, and I’m certain that every other opportunity is exhausted first.

All this outrage over a few zoo animals would be better directed at hog confinement animal farming, where the Chinese are now poisoning US soil to grow cheap meat to be sold abroad.

@ibstubro On the deer issue, the rampant population of deer causes harmful accidents, death and other negative repercussions. So does the wild boar population, large snakes released into the wild, etc… Tell me it wouldn’t be cool to see giraffe’s roaming the countryside in Montana or Utah- lol

Cruelty in nature, again, is human ego affording such.
Animals do not act from ego, make conscious decisions to be “cruel”, they just act on their thousands of years of adaptive evolution. There is no cruelty in nature, cruelty must be of a premeditated unfolding, like wantonly choosing to leave a dog tired to a tree for 3 years until its collar grows into its neck, or callously choosing to allow a horse to starve to death in a captive environment where it is not free to move on to greener pastures.

Humans create cruelty by the choices they make and their attitudes that animals well being is not important. In nature the life cycles simply unfold and are neither good nor bad nor “cruel.”

I think that’s part of the fear, @KNOWITALL. The zoos feel a responsibility to guarantee the animals a humane existence. If they allow the animals to be placed outside the zoo system they lose control of the animal’s future. They don’t want the animals exploited for money.

That was the heart of my ”I don’t think the prime function of a zoo is the same as a circus or an amusement park comment.

@ragingloli That reminds me, on Amish mafia the other night told a prospective bride “Amish men like to plow a lot”, like two or three times a day, and the trainer chick looked like Jabba, it was hilarious. :)

The two cubs that were put down were ten months old. WHY did they breed the female and male if they did not want the cubs? The excuse with the giraffe was that it was too dangerous and complicated to neuter the adult giraffes that parented Maurice. But we all know it’s easy to neuter cats – or keep them apart, for that matter (same with the giraffes).

I do not understand the logic of breeding animals in captivity and then “culling” their offspring.

@GoldieAV16 I don’t know all the details of the story, but the plan was for them to introduce a new male into the pride. A new male would kill any cubs that were not his own anyway – that is the nature of lions.

Everyone complains when zoos try to control the genetics of their animals… but wild animals have their own ways of doing this. Unsurprisingly, it is less humane when they do it.

I don’t have answers to your questions. But it doesn’t seem that weird to me. The new male is meant to mate with the two females born in 2012. Could they know before a litter was produced in 2013 that there would be a new male coming in? How long does it take to find and request the male? Maybe a long time. Were they perhaps hoping for more females in the 2013 litter?

I just don’t understand the immediate “I am outraged!” response to a zoo’s decisions about its animals. According to this article there are a thousand such choices made every year in European zoos alone. That doesn’t surprise me in the least. These are not shelters for wayward housecats. A zoo’s animal populations are expensive to care for, their resources are limited – and their mandate is conservation of the species, not of individuals (as they say in the article). How could it be otherwise?

@dappled_leaves Sounds like communism if you ask me. Sacrifice individuals for the greater good of the supreme species. Conservation should not mean wanton “disposal” of any singular creature based on the next, bigger and better specimen.
The individual counts. Better planning and a big picture mentality is called for IMHO.

@dappled_leaves We have a small zoo here, and the entire city is heartbroken when an animal dies of old age or complications, a lot of people take animal rights and welfare very seriously. I don’t really understand your lack of outrage at the dismemberment of a healthy animal and a public feeding with children in the background.

When I was a volunteer at the zoo in hs, we were taught to respect the animals and our welfare both when working with them, I can’t imagine anyone I worked with being so callous about the animals they’re supposed to love and protect, it’s not just a money-making venture for them.

Be real, @dappled_leaves. These are lions and tigers and giraffes. If you want to knock something in the head with a sledge hammer and grind it up into burger, go find a cow or a pig. Wring a chicken’s neck.

You don’t understand that these are exotic (to us) animals we’re talking about.

Someone ran over one of my park ducks today. It looked deliberate, no way could the skid mark of carnage have happened in a 5mph zone in the little parking lot.
My forensic deductions ascertained that someone purposely ran over this little duck. God help the Mofo had I witnessed a deliberate act of cruelty. Someone better bake me a cake with a file in it because I would be jailed for assault!

@Brian1946 I am well-known in my locale as an animal supporter/activist. Many of the millionaires & Billionaires who reside down the street from me despise me as I fight them and their hare brained cull ideas non-stop. Also, I’d be reporting any cruelty regarding wildlife to the evil, guerilla-like group that is the Wisconsin DNR